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film

Directors in Focus: Jean Rouch

Jaguar

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FOR FILMS AND EVENTS PRESENTED BY IHP, Tickets ARE Also Available From the IHP Box Office, which is normally open Tue-Sat from noon-8pm (or, for events outside of those times, from one hour before until one hour after the scheduled starting time). call 215-387-5125, menu option 2.

One of Jean Rouch’s classic ethnofictions, Jaguar follows three
young Songhay men from Niger—Lam Ibrahim, Illo Goudel’ize, and the legendary
performer Damouré Zika—on a journey to the Gold Coast (modern day Ghana).
Drawing from his own fieldwork on intra-African migration, the results of which
he published in the 1956 book Migrations au Ghana, Rouch collaborated with his
three subjects on an improvisational narrative. The four filmed the trip in
mid-1950s, and reunited a few years later to record the sound, the participants
remembering dialogue and making up commentary. The result is a playful film
that finds three African men performing ethnography of their own culture.

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Jamie Berthe is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her research interests include ethnographic and documentary film, African cinema, postcolonial studies, French colonial history and cultural politics, and visual culture. Jamie's dissertation – “An Art of Ambivalence: On Jean Rouch, African Cinema, and the Complexities of the (Post)Colonial Encounter” – explores the evolution and legacy of Jean Rouch's film work in relationship to French colonial history and African film.